A response to Will Stack's video by friend, colleague and brilliant sociologist E. Badekur.
Just some thoughts for everyone praising this video and loving on the "I don't see race, people are people" thing. I'm going to point out a few things floating around that are offensive and hurtful to people who have experienced police violence.
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I DON'T SEE COLOUR, IT'S NOT A RACE ISSUE.
When you say you don't see colour - whether you intend to do this or not - you're actually minimizing the experiences and the perspectives of people of colour. When you do this in relation to police violence, you're choosing to ignore the lived experience and the empirical reality of hyper-policing in working class, racialized communities.
Yes, we are all living, breathing humans. But more relevant than this "human project" is the reality that race matters. It does. It's offensive to people and communities who find themselves at the losing end of violent encounters with police officers to say that this doesn't matter. In policing, race is a characteristic used to categorize, divide and assess us. Not all of us pass this test.
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JUST ACT LIKE A CIVIL HUMAN BEING, YOU'LL BE FINE.
When you imply that civility is something that works - that being nice and kind to officers is the only way to navigate a stop - by extension you're implying that people who report being verbally and physically assaulted, even murdered by officers, put themselves in those positions because they weren't acting in a civilized way. Not only is this untrue, but the idea also removes any kind of responsibility from officers to know when and when not to use lethal force. (Walter Scott was literally running away.)
With this you're also saying that the over-representation of people of colour in the criminal justice system is because of their inability to "act civilly" and ignoring larger patterns of bias in policing - what kinds of communities are policed? What kinds of people are stopped? How they're approached and treated by officers?
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NOT ALL OFFICERS ARE RACISTS
No, but policing as an institution is. Racism is not just something that individuals do. It's generally much more oppressive in nature when it's embodied by entire institutions, enforced systemically. (Carding in Toronto, Stop and Frisk in New York City) You don't need to be a Klan-subscribing racist to support these kinds of institutions and policies.
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LABELS ARE FOR SOUP CANS, PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE.
The "labels are for soup cans" thing is cute, but the issue is that they're real and everyday we make sense of people through these kinds of labels. If you choose to ignore them, you're ignoring reality and silencing people.
Peace!
